


children of the moon

by forkidcest



Series: the brightest stars [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Mind Meld, Pseudo-Incest, Psychic Abilities, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 17:11:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16022318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forkidcest/pseuds/forkidcest
Summary: Dave and Rose are not like other children. Growing up is hard, and lonely, and nobody (else) understands.A stand-alone prequel to my fill for Drone Season 2018.





	children of the moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pearlybj](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearlybj/gifts), [Clamdiver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clamdiver/gifts).



Your name is Rose Lalonde.

| 

Your name is Dave Strider.  
  
---|---  
  
You are terribly lonely.

You have always felt different from other children, other people. Perhaps it's due to how they sometimes look at you, with your pale skin and oddly colored eyes, as if you were something strange and otherworldly. Perhaps you are something strange and otherworldly. You certainly feel like a stranger.

You have been hungry all your life for something you cannot name or even find the shape of, always dissatisfied and never knowing why, feeling not only alone, but fundamentally incomplete.  
  
You try to understand it, delving into psychology books well beyond your age level, researching maladies of the mind and disturbances of the spirit. You develop an interest in the occult, and pore over accounts of ghosts, possession, arcane rites and stories of unknowable entities beyond the stars. You are not sure whether you believe the things you read, but feel sure there must be something out there.

| 

You try to ignore it, throwing yourself into your hobbies, music and photography and ironic comedy. Your efforts in the latter garner you a small internet following through your blogs and webcomic, a hideous masterpiece of shitty art. You become fascinated by death, and begin to collect the corpses of small animals, learning to preserve them through trial and error and online tutorials.  
  
Growing up is hard, and nobody understands.  
  
Your mother doesn't know how to talk to you, and you view her attempts with suspicion. Her expressions of affection always feel false, strained. You are cold to her. She tries to smother you with love, and you rebuff her kindnesses. They feel impossible to you, and therefore insincere. She gives you expensive gifts, and retreats to her home office with a glass of gin, and you welcome her distance and resent it in equal measure. 

When she worries about you, you pretend to be fine with a dedication that borders on aggression.

| 

Your brother's childrearing skills leave something to be desired. Okay, he's a shit guardian. That's fine, you're cool, you don't need to be coddled. You feel a kind of kinship with him, anyway, maybe because he's the only person you know who seems as weird and out of place in society as you always feel, and you try to emulate his constantly chill demeanor and absolute refusal to give a single fraction of a fuck about social norms and the opinions of others. 

His puppet fetish is hells of unsettling, though.   
  
You learn to hide your misery. 

It isn't even difficult. People are very willing to overlook things they have no wish to see, and the feelings of other people's children tend to fall squarely in that category, along with the less than ideal conditions of their home lives, and any uncanny abilities they might happen to possess. Your striking appearance draws attention, of course, but you are--as your teachers put it-- _gifted_. 

You are aloof, you are unflappable, you cover the endless well of emptiness inside you with an air of superiority and spin webs of words that amuse and confuse and impress and disconcert your listeners without ever letting a shred of yourself slip through. You are bright and sharp as a blade, as a shard of mirror, adept at turning conversation to your own ends and defending your private thoughts with cutting mockery. 

This is not your only gift.  
  
Your intuition is extraordinary. 

When you have a gut feeling about something, good or bad, you are always right. You don't notice for a while--it's hardly surprising that you perform better on exams when you feel confident and fail to enjoy social interactions when you expect them to go badly. But one evening you look up as your mother exits the house in three inch stilettos and say mildly, "you're going to break an ankle if you wear those shoes, you know." She laughs, and leaves, and you are unconcerned when she hasn't come home by eleven pm, and unsurprised when she arrives three hours later in a walking cast. This, on reflection, strikes you as odd. 

You test yourself, deliberately ignoring the niggling feeling that urges you to stay inside one sunny day (you are drenched by a sudden rainstorm), following the absurd impulse to purchase a scratch-off lottery ticket (you win $100), insisting that your mother pull the car over when you're shaken by a sudden sense of dread (a pickup truck blows through the intersection just ahead of you), and conclude that your odd instincts are reliable.

| 

Your reflexes are extraordinary. 

The ease with which you can dodge projectiles and catch falling objects is uncanny. It takes you a while to realize that you're quicker than you should be, not just impressively fast but _impossibly_ fast. The literal tipping point comes on the day that you knock an open bottle of apple juice over with your elbow and actually see the arc of its descent slow as you reach to right it, just in time to prevent a sticky spill on your turntables. You make a few videos with your webcam, and see yourself moving at a speed that you'd ascribe to special effects if you saw it in a movie. At first you think the playback speed is fucked up, but nope, that's all you. 

Once you've realized what you can do, and started to practice, you find that you can feel the difference. From the outside it looks like you're zooming around like the fuckin' Flash, but to you, it's like time slows down to accommodate you. Soon you can speed or slow the tick of passing seconds, altering the tempo at which you experience the world as easily as you adjust the bpm of songs when you're beatmatching.   
  
You don't tell anyone what you can do. 

Who would you tell? Your guardian is largely absent, and has never been privy to your innermost thoughts in any case. You have schoolmates and acquaintances, but no friends, no one you are close to. You have never been sufficiently invested in appearing normal to cultivate real relationships with people who feel alien to you. 

You feel sure that if you ever met someone who was like you, you would recognize them, somehow.   
  
When you are thirteen, you begin to see the souls of those around you. It confirms what you have always known, that you are different; your soul is unlike theirs in a way you cannot put into words but can nevertheless see clearly. It is somehow simultaneously brighter and fainter. 

When you are sixteen, you see the light around you begin to dim, so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. You are certain that you will fade away to nothing if you cannot find a way to stop it, but cannot feel any clear path to a remedy. You feel weak, and ravenous, and small.

| 

When you are thirteen, you begin to sense the age of everything you touch. You are banned from several area museums for disturbing items on display. There is a strange familiarity in the feeling of things that are very old. You think some intangible part of you must be ancient. 

When you are sixteen, a countdown begins in your head. It is not steady like the implacable ticking of the clocks in TV dramas and horror films; it speeds like an elevated pulse and slows like an old watch winding down, not following any patten you can discern or predict.  
  
It frightens you.   
  
You dream of an unfamiliar room, with a window overlooking a noisy street in an unfamiliar city. The setting sun shines through a layer of smog, turning the sky a vivid orange.

| 

You dream of an enormous empty house, furnished like a display catalogue and echoing with the distant sound of rushing water. Outside the windows is nothing but thick darkness.  
  
You dream of a fantastic city, impossible spires spearing an indigo sky. It feels like home. 

You dream that you are an ageless being of light. You are mighty and free and joyous, you fly on wings of fire and outshine the stars. 

You dream that you are whole. 

You wake feeling hollowed out, a human shell concealing a yawning emptiness. 

You feel a pull behind your breastbone, a pressure behind your eyes, a rising restlessness that drives you to move. You cannot bear to stay in one place. You drop out of school, leave the consternation of your teachers and the murmuring gossip of your classmates (never your peers) and the suffocating atmosphere of the home that has never really felt like one. You let your instincts guide you in a meandering path across the country, haunting bus stations and city parks, college campuses and all night diners.   
  
You kiss a girl whose soul glows pure and bright, and it flows into you until you feel as though you are floating. She is dimmer when she pulls away, wearing a faintly confused smile.

| 

You meet a girl who giggles like music at your jokes, and the countdown sinks to the back of your mind when you touch her, muting the urgency of your anxiety.  
  
When the moment passes, you feel as hollow as before. 

*****  
  
The sense of formless urgency within you grows until you feel frantic with it.   
  
And then, one morning, you wake up knowing exactly where to go. You see the budget motel clear as memory, the keycard in (your?) hand, the matching number on the nondescript door. 

| 

The erratic clock in your head stops abruptly, and the tight-wound tension in you melts away, leaving you with a disorienting sense of calm. You sit in a stillness that feels purposeful, and wait.   
  
You find the door, take a breath, and raise your hand to knock. 

| 

You hear a single sharp rap on the door, and move to open it.   
  
You come face to face with yourself.  
  
| 

Then you know that this is it, that this girl--or her absence--is why you've felt lost and incomplete ever since you can remember.  
  
He is stunned by the sight of you. You don't know how you can tell, since his face remains impassive and his eyes are hidden, but you can feel it--and then you feel the echo of his thoughts, as well.

|   
| 

Oh shit, you think, I have a fucking twin, this is some daytime TV separated at birth melodrama bullshit--   
  
You smile. "We were separated before birth, actually," you tell him, and impossible or not, you know it's true.

|   
| 

What the fuck, she just read your mind, you always thought all that mystical twin powers shit was fake as hell but here's this girl wearing your face and you know you're not that easy to read, you know it--   
  
"To me, you are," you say. Looking at him is like looking in a mirror. 

|   
| 

How the fuck is she _doing_ that--  
  
"Dave," you say. He hasn't told you his name, but it feels right in your mouth. "Dave. I'm not your twin, I'm your soulmate."

|   
| 

Okay, okay, this shit is crazy, but the words ring true in your head, in her calm soft voice that's so impossibly familiar--   
  
You step up to him, and take his hands, and kiss him--

|   
| 

The knowledge floods into you like daylight into a crypt broken open, like she-- _Rose_ \--is tearing down the blackout curtains in a disused room inside you and letting in the sun for the first time, glorious and blinding and painfully bright.   
  
It's like nothing you've ever felt before, like fire and light, like flight. You cling together, giddy with it, the glorious heady shock of sudden, intimate connection.  
  
| 

_Yes_ , she thinks into your mind, _yes, we were magnificent._  
  
You feel his awe and his hunger, as strong as yours. 

|   
| 

You feel her joy in the memory and her sorrow at the loss, the power and pride you felt when you were one being, and you stagger and almost fall, sit heavily on the edge of the bed and stare up at her, panting and dizzy.   
  
He is flushed and stunned and beautiful, and you feel the rhythm of his heart and his ragged breathing, and see the pulse and flicker of his soul. Your soul. 

|   
| 

She looks far too composed for what just happened, what you just felt, but her lips are parted and wet and her eyes are glowing, impossibly bright. She is as old as you are, down to the second, and she is much, much, older.   
  
"That's impossible," he says, "what the fuck, that isn't--what _are_ we, Rose?" 

|   
| 

"We are... broken," she says. "Human, or nearly so. Much less than what we were."   
  
You don't know what you were. Not exactly. You don't know if there's even a word, a name to put to it; if there is, you haven't found it in all your searching. 

|   
| 

She squeezes your hand, says, "We were mighty and terrible and perfect. Celestial. Divine, maybe."   
  
He nods. "So we're like... a fallen angel," he says. The metaphor is imperfect, but the feeling in you when he meets your eyes is the same. 

|   
| 

"Yes," she says, "yes, I suppose so."   
  
You kiss again, and again, open-mouthed and eager, reveling in the thrill of merging, mouth and mind and soul. It's overwhelming. You are breathless, you are trembling, you are so close--   
  
You straddle him, looping your arms around his neck. Your dress is hiked up around your hips and you don't need to ask him what he wants, don't need to tell him what to do. You don't need to say anything at all. 

|   
| 

Her thighs are pressed tight around your hips. You unfasten the tiny hook at the back of hr neck with shaking fingers and unzip her dress, feeling the bump of each vertebra as you draw the tab down to the small of her back.   
  
He runs his hand back up your spine and takes the straps of your dress, pulls them off your shoulders, and you sit back just enough to put your palms against his chest, hot through the thin material of his shirt, and push him to lie back on the mattress, leaning over him. The loose straps tickle as they slip down your arms, and you shiver. 

|   
| 

Her dress is falling down. Your hands rise to cup her breasts and she arches her back, pushing them into your palms, shifting on top of you, fuck, you're so hard, you've never been this turned on your life--   
  
His thumbs brush your nipples and you gasp-- 

|   
| 

"Oh," she says, a sound of startled pleasure, "oh, yes, that's good, Dave--"   
  
It feels amazing but you need more, so you rise up on your knees and lean forward, rest your forearms on the mattress to either side of his head, and he tips his chin up and licks, teasing you with the tip of his tongue, circling and flicking. 

|   
| 

Fuck, the texture of her nipple tightening under your tongue and the breathy sounds she's making go straight to your dick and so do your hands, multitasking is difficult so you stop being delicate and just suck on her breast while you frantically unfasten your jeans, shoving denim and cotton just enough out of the way--   
  
The back of his hand brushes the crotch of your panties and you grind down on it, let him feel how hot you are. He groans, releasing your nipple, and his breath on your wet skin makes you shiver, along with his hands sliding up your thighs, under the bunched fabric of your dress. 

|   
| 

Her underwear is silky under your fingertips, warm from her skin and damp between her legs, fuck, that's so hot. Your hands are shaking as you tug the fabric down and to the side, just enough--   
  
He arches helplessly as you sink down on him, throwing his head back with a desperate moan. His face is flushed pink and his expression is almost frantic with desire. It's immensely satisfying, nearly as much as the feel of him inside you. 

|   
| 

She still seems almost composed--controlled, anyway, in the deliberate way she moves, riding you with a maddeningly slow rhythm. "Mmm," she says, just the slightest edge of breathlessness in her voice as she rocks on your dick, "oh, that's very nice, Dave, you feel so good--"   
  
He slides trembling hands up your sides, splaying his fingers like he's trying to play the arches of your ribs, palms your breasts and pinches your nipples. 

|   
| 

"Ah," she says, "ah, Dave--"   
  
His hair is sticking to his sweaty forehead and his breathing is ragged and he is lit from within, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. 

|   
| 

Rose looks exalted. Her smooth pale skin glows and her hair swings down in a soft curtain that brushes your hot face as she bends to kiss you again. She's stopped lifting up and sinking back, just sits on your dick and grinds down, rocking a little, and your toes curl in your sneakers, your skin prickles with sweat.   
  
You can feel your hearts beating in identical rhythm. You move together easily, awash in the sensations of thrusting up and rocking down, sweet slickness and pressure and heat, all of it building to a crescendo of pleasure that has you crying out in stereo and leaves you trembling in the wake of a synchronous doubled orgasm. 

You collapse in a limp and sweaty heap, trembling with aftershocks, reveling in your intimate connection, feeling for the first time the joy of certain belonging, of knowing and being truly known. 

Gradually your breathing slows, and falls out of sync. You open your eyes, and disentangle your limbs, and separate,   
  
slipping out of his mind 

| 

falling into your body   
  
settling back into your own singular skin. 

***** 

You are stranger than you were before. Your eyes are brighter, now, and your skin has a barely perceptible glow, invisible in the light, faint enough in the dark for most people to dismiss as a trick of the eye. You no longer seem to age. 

You are not sure what you are. It doesn't matter. You're not alone. As long as you're together, you are whole. 


End file.
